The problem is, that unless the content is moderated you never know what will be added. Spammers and automated bots love to leave their mark on websites that allow them to, resulting in comments and forums filling up with rubbish – often including content and links to websites that you, the website owner, would rather didn’t exist on your website.

As well as being unpleasant for your website’s visitors to see, it’s also dangerous for SEO as Google isn’t going to recommend a website that features links to unpleasant websites.

Of course, the key word in all of this was ‘moderated’. You should, no… you must ensure that all content on your website is moderated. Whether you have added the content or not, your website will be held accountable by the search engines (and everyone else) for the content it contains.

Moderating content takes time however, and many website owners don’t have this sort of time to spare when they’re running their business. Therefore they often take the stance of not allowing comments, not featuring reviews and never considering the benefits of a forum. This is a mistake, because user generated content is one of the best forms of SEO. You’re receiving regularly updated content, all of it relevant to your website and each page, for free. You can’t put a price on this sort of content, and stopping it before it starts will prove very expensive in the level of SEO and marketing that you will need to do in order to make up the ground.

Don’t ring-fence your website from user generated content – embrace it. Just keep an eye on it and don’t allow any offensive, irrelevant or spam content to be added.

They believed that the switching of computer calendars to a new millennium would cause untold havoc, and that companies such as Microsoft hadn’t accounted for it in their software and operating systems.

As it transpired, the year 1999 rolled over into 2000 without incident and the whole Millennium Bug thing was forgotten about. What was also forgotten about was the number of bogus IT firms who charged handsomely for their Millennium Bug health check services, ensuring that your computer systems were, now what was the phrase again? …Y2K Compliant.

This type of fear and hysteria cost businesses a lot of money and allowed scam artists to take advantage of the panic.

Thankfully, as another decade passes we have become much savvier when it comes to IT systems and no one would fall for a scare tactic like that again… would they?

Have a happy, and uneventful from a computer systems point of view, New Year.

One option is to say that you’re in Internet marketing, as this covers all manner of online work from SEO to PPC and online PR. However, many people, when the hear the term ‘Internet marketing’, conjure up images of you selling merchandise over the Internet in a sort of cold calling for the Internet role. Telling someone you’re in Internet marketing may lead to a lengthy description of your actual job anyway.

You could tell people that you’re in IT, as all forms of Internet marketing obviously use computers, and an SEO will have knowledge of computers, programming languages and servers. However, once again this often misses the mark because people will assume you know how to network a printer, install an operating system and worst of all, solve problems with their computers… this is never good.

Web developer is another option you could plump for, or even web designer (as this is more common on credit check and insurance forms) but again this is fairly wide of the mark. Telling someone you’re in the web design/development industry could lead them to tell you about a website they want built, or someone they know who wants a website. This isn’t your area and isn’t going to be of interest.

No, it seems that biting the bullet and saying that you’re an SEO is the only accurate option, no matter how long it takes to explain.

If you’re an SEO, what do you tell people you do for a living?

However, many people have fallen foul of these bold claims from Alexa and don’t realise that it can only record statistics from visitors who actually have the Alexa Toolbar installed on their browser… do you?

Of course, the people most likely to have the Alexa Toolbar installed are those who want to check their own stats, and because of the lack of widespread use of the Toolbar, simply installing it and accessing your own website a few times per day will increase your Alexa ‘ranking’. Alexa has been described famously as a ‘Tamagotchi for Webmasters’ because you can see your site grow with every click of your mouse.

For this reason, any ‘stats’ offered by Alexa are wildly inaccurate at best, at worst they’re total guesswork. Incredible then that many so called Internet marketing professionals (usually those people involved with buying advertising) still use Alexa when judging whether to advertise on a website.

What is more incredible is that some people even use Alexa to monitor their own web traffic instead of something reliable such as, oh we don’t know, maybe Google Analytics. Using Alexa to track your website’s traffic is like using a Ouija board as an answering machine.

With that scathing insult, let’s look at seven uses for Alexa.com in an Internet marketing environment.

1. You can self inflate your own ranking to make others think your website is more important than it really is.
2. This could allow you to land advertising from people less informed about Internet marketing.
3. It acts as a link to your website.
4. It features your website’s URL so could, in theory, be used for reputation management… say, that’s actually pretty good. We’ll write that one down.
5. You can see related sites that other people have clicked on as well as yours, which could be useful for identifying competition or link partners.
6. The pretty graphs are a nice shade of blue.
7. We give up, it’s hopeless. Alexa is as much use as a 4×4 in Chiswick.

For what it’s worth, here’s our Alexa ranking. Isn’t it lovely?

This is a great way of keeping in touch with the latest developments in SEO and Internet Marketing, directly on Facebook. It’s also much more convenient for Facebook addicts than subscribing via RSS feed or by following us on Twitter.

Creating Facebook pages is also an excellent way of using social networking to promote your business or brand online because you can reach a lot of people very quickly and can benefit from the unique way that users of Facebook interpret your posts and interact with them. Whenever you make a post on your own website, as we do here on StuckOn.co.uk, you can have your posts automatically added to your Facebook page via RSS, so you don’t need to do any extra work to maintain your Facebook fan page.

Are you making the most of Facebook and other social networking websites? If not, join us on Facebook and learn how we do it here at StuckOn.

Sonya McNally is a teacher and she was discussing her class with another teacher over Facebook, making the comment:

By the way, (class) 8G1 are just as bad as 8G2.

This seemingly innocuous comment caused offense to Kirsten Allenby-Moore, who reported her to the council. She wrote in a complaint letter:

I found the comments personally insulting as the 2 classes mentioned where [sic] both mine.

As a result of the complaint, Sonya McNally has been suspended from work by North East Lincolnshire Council. She has been accused of bringing the school into disrepute for her comments.

This situation highlights the dangers of writing comments on social networking websites, although posting a private message to a colleague shouldn’t have led to this outcome.